While my initial contacts with music were through my father's violin playing and his record collection of Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky...I was not myself actively involved in music until, at the James H. Bowen High School of South Chicago, I began studying clarinet at the age of fourteen and oboe and English horn at sixteen.... In addition to playing in my high-school band and orchestra, I was a member of the American Conservatory and South-Side Symphony Orchestras in Chicago.